While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.
Back in my Pentecostal days, there was a phrase I heard non-stop: “the original Greek and Hebrew,” used to describe my denomination’s doctrines and creed. The idea was that our denomination, unlike those of all those other inferior Christians doing everything wrong, had gotten our ideas from “the original Greek and Hebrew” and therefore were closer to what our god wanted out of his followers than all those other Christians were. I notice that Christians still love that phrase, so I want to talk about it today.
Another church is closing–part of an overall trend in America. What does it mean?
I wish it could shock me anymore, seeing a family ripped apart by religion. It happens constantly in this modern age–and will probably get worse, really. But this story touched me particularly today because it hit a few all-too-familiar notes in that discordant jangle that is the Cult of Before Stories.
Biff was so proud of himself, but I was so horrified.
A while ago, Kirk Cameron popularized a fairly-new evangelism technique: claiming that he knows all about atheism because he, himself, was once an (gasp! Shock! OMG!) atheist. He thought it gave him some kind of leg up on authority and credibility to say that he’d once been an atheist, and Read more
Like so many ex-Christians before me, for just a brief time I dangled on a tightrope between belief and disbelief as I moved from one world to another, from one worldview to another, from one entire working paradigm to another. For some of us that time lasts a good long while, maybe even years. For others of us, that abrupt flash of sudden comprehension, that crystallizing gasp of awareness, that feeling of all the puzzle pieces falling right into place, it happens in a heartbeat.
Remember furries? Those are the kids who think that they’re “really” animals in human form. Back in the 90s they were the emerging weirdos of the internet and became our collective punching bags, a low status they bore with varying degrees of grace. You’d see them prancing around town in Read more
I wanted to mention one thing that happened during those horse-riding lessons before we draw back the curtain on them for a while, and that is the value of being flexible about your plans. It came to pass, near the end of the lessons, that it was a very hot Read more
This story is about how I learned to ford a river and finally came to some truths about my old religious indoctrination–and finally figured out that horses are bastards. This was oh, about twelve years ago. I’d just moved to this mountainous state full of ranches and by wild serendipity Read more